Talk:3. P2P in the Economic Sphere

From P2P Foundation

A number of correction proposals have been sent in by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, for the section 3.1.A:

I've read the chapter about P2P and economics, and found the overall point of the text to be valid and interesting. I like the term "peer production"; it is a big improvement on "open source development model". "Peer production" fits fields other than software, where there is no such thing as source code as such.

However, I found a number of important errors of detail in that chapter.

• It refers to the "General Public License". Please give the full name, "GNU General Public License".

• It speaks of "the Creative Commons License", but there is no such thing. Creative Commons is a brand of license; that organization publishes many different licenses, which so different in their actual terms that it makes no sense to speak of them as a group. The widespread practice of talking about them as a group is extremely harmful. I urge people to avoid saying anything about "Creative Commons licenses" in general, and instead to speak about specific

licenses only.

• It says that Red Hat sells "version of Linux", but that's a misnomer. The system this refers to is basically GNU, with Linux added as the kernel. Many people call it "Linux", but that gives the

principal developers, the GNU Project, none of the credit. Would you please call it the "GNU/Linux" system, and give us equal mention?

See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html for more explanation of this.

• Where it mentions the Open Source Initiative, how about mentioning the comparable and older free software organization -- the Free Software Foundation ( fsf.org)?

• The description of the Free Software ethos is partly incorrect. The Free Software movement does NOT say that our work is "not for exchange on the market". On the contrary, everyone is free to sell copies of free software. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html.

The accurate way to describe the difference between the Free Software idea and the Open Source idea is this: the Free Software idea is about ethics, specifically about the freedom that the users deserve; the Open Source idea is about efficiency and convenience, and explicitly disclaims any view that users _deserve_ freedom.

• It speaks of an "obligation of free distribution" as part of the Free Software idea, but that is an incorrect picture of our position. We do not say that anyone is _obligated_ to distribute. Free software means you are free to distribute copies, if you wish, but you are not obligated to do so.

• The distinction that "FS explicitly rejects ownership of software" while Open Source "accepts ownership" is inaccurate. That is not where the difference actually lies. What the free software movement rejects is not "ownership of software" but "denial of the users'

freedom". Legally speaking, most free software is copyrighted, so the copyright has an owner.

• There is a statement that "open source licenses allow segments of code to be used in proprietary and commercial projects, something impossible with pure free software".

This is not true. Many free software licenses, including the X11 license and the two BSD licenses, permit use of the code in proprietary programs. ALL free software licenses permit use of the code in _commercial_ software, since that is part of the essential freedom that we defend.

Did you think that "pure free software" is synonymous with "under the GNU GPL" and that the X11 license and the BSD licenses are only "open source"? That is a common misconception.

Please see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html to see how many free software licenses there are. Most (but not all) open source licenses are free software licenses.

• The chapter uses the term "intellectual property rights", and even says that the free software movement is rooted in a "modification of intellectual property rights".

Actually we have no ideas about "intellectual property rights"; we have consciously decided not think in such terms, because that term is biased and confusing.

Copyright law exists, and we criticize some aspects of it (but we do not call for its abolition). However, it is a mistake to refer to copyright as "intellectual property rights", because that confuses copyright with other unrelated laws such as patent law and trademark law. It is vital for clear thinking to keep these subjects separate.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation of why the term "intellectual property" should _never_ be used.

• The last paragraph speaks a lot about "open source" rather than using your superior term, "peer production".